Movie: Until Night Falls. Another exercise in the
futility of boiling a life down to a biopic: Reinaldo Arenas,
novelist, homosexual, fellow traveler and eventual exile of the
Cuban revolution. Reminds me a bit of the Joe Orton movie, but
Prick Up Your Ears was simpler, cleaner, more coherent,
and perhaps most importantly free from the political cloudcover
that comes with Americans grappling with Cuba. B+

The ham was a bit of a fluke: I was planning on cooking trout, but when
I saw a very small (2.5 lb.) "fresh ham" in a Vietnamese grocery, I had
to try it. I'd made this recipe once before, but with a pre-cooked ham,
and the results were somewhat mixed. But since it's a long slow process
(whereas most Chinese is lots-of-preparation followed by a short-but-intense
cooking phase), this added little to my workload. I'm not sure that the
cut that I purchased really was ham (the texture was more like pork
loin), but the technique came out very well.

Been busy. Mostly working on Robert Christgau's future web site.
Made some decent progress learning PHP and setting up a MySQL
database for the Consumer Guide data. Spent the weekend
hacking out web pages to maintain the database. Need content.

Got my domain name (tomhull.com) registered. Put a token web
page over there. I figure these web pages will (mostly) drift
that direction, but no big rush.

Still catching up with last year's records, adding the following
to the 2000 Year End List:

Chicks on Speed: Will Save Us All. At last, a proper
heir to Silver Convention and LiliPUT. Aufhebung, even.

Fatboy Slim: Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars.

Mystikal: Let's Get Ready. The Mahlathini of Hip-Hop.

Guy Davis: Butt Naked Free.

Modest Mouse: The Moon in Antarctica. Perhaps the most
scientific record of the year: more than one might expect from alt-new
wavers.

Sue Foley: Love Comin' Down. Not as confident in her
newfound maturity as Twelve Days in December, which we just
mean she's wiser. At least, "Same Thing" dives deeper into muddy
waters than even McKinley Morganfield.

Still got a backlog of real good rap records: Ghost Dog: The Way
of the Samurai, Talib Kweli & Hi-Tek: Reflection
Eternal, Mos Def: Black on Both Sides, Wu-Tang
Clan: The W, Lyricist Lounge Vol. 2, Dead
Prez: Let's Get Free. Any or all of these could crack the
list.

The death of Morton Downey Jr. reminds me of another chain smoking,
talk show asshole, who likewise succumbed to lung cancer: Joe Pyne.
As a teenager, I followed Pyne both on TV and radio. Don't remember
much about it, but Pyne liked to bash guests of all persuasions.
The ones I most remember were Nathaniel Branden, Anton Szandor Lavay,
and Paul Krassner -- people willing to take a little abuse for their
causes. Branden was insufferable, Lavay a stupid joke, but unindicted
coconspirator Krassner was my guy. The other thing I remember about
Pyne was an offhand comment that he made, that had a huge effect on
me: he relayed the story of talking to a famous scientist, where he
asked the scientist whether he used the scientific method. Scientist
replies, "sometimes, when it works." Philosophy at the time was
dominated by logical positivists in slavish pursuit of scientific
method. This one comment crystalized my preference for pragmatism.
Thenceforth, the more interesting question was, "what works?"

Never watched Downey. One's interest and amusement with assholes
wanes over time.

Newspaper articles about high tech companies slipping and sliding:
NASDAQ falls again, Cisco layoffs, Intel layoffs, ... I can see an
essay developing, "Wasn't Capitalism Fun?" I've always maintained
that the stock market boom was a case of too much investible money
chasing too few really useful businesses. This is the first thing
that happens when you let rich people have all the money. The
second thing is that their apparent wealth hinges on the greater
fool theory: since stocks (not just dot-com phantasmes) aren't
reasonably worth what they're selling for, their prices are
based on no more than the expectation that some other fool will
sooner or later pay even more. This leads to hair trigger sell-offs,
the drunken meandering that comes from trying to stay one step
ahead of the rest of the world. The third thing that happens,
when this sort of bubble sustains over any appreciable amount
of time, is that people become preoccupied with speculation as
opposed to real, useful work.

It's become a commonplace that the only way to get ahead nowadays
is to invest and own property. With wages stagnant (or worse),
the imperative to make it by investing and owning things hasn't
been so pervasive since the days of Jane Austen's novels --
perhaps a clue to their newfound Hollywood popularity.

The speculative boom has had a lot of effects, especially in
distorting how businesses are planned and run, especially in
the high-tech sectors which have largely driven the boom.
(More because of the Internet bonanza than anything else.)
One thing that few people seem to appreciate is how corrupting
money is to a business -- especially money that hasn't been
earned. One effect of the boom is that businesses are now
full of people who are hopelessly corrupt -- people think that
the riches accrued in riding the boom were the fruits of their
own genius. Similarly, investors are now hopelessly hooked on
unrealistic speculative returns, to the point where they won't
even consider doing something that is merely useful.

This corruption will become ever more obvious as the market
deflates. Saw another article the about how Japan has been
trapped in deflation since 1990. I find this disturbing not
so much because I view deflation itself as a problem. Actually,
it's the converse: my favorite approach to the economy is to
drive the production and consumption of junk down (both to
free up worktime and to reduce environmental strain), and
to broaden the consumption of useful goods and services by
driving their prices down (by various means, including more
competition, easier financing, reducing property rents,
subsidizing infrastructure, and restricting advertising),
and this approach is strongly deflationary.

However, the problem here is that capitalism has no good
instincts for dealing with deflation. To paint a relatively
pretty picture on it, capitalism's great strength is that it
promotes the freedom to produce. It is also extremely amoral
about what is produced -- this doesn't bother me much about
specific products, but does get rather obscene when you start
talking about aggregates like GDP (Gross Domestic Product).
This is a system that only works one way -- toward growth,
which is basically toward total consumption. However, when
capitalism's growth engine falters (which happens periodically,
partly on suspicion that there may be a shortage of greater
fools, and partly deliberate sabotage by the money mongers),
the result is a massive wastage of potential work and value.

Wrote a little doggerel in an HTML job form, perhap worth saving
here:

If I may digress a bit, one interesting thing about awk is that it
was not so much a new language as an informalization of languages
and conventions that were already well known (c, sh). Also, where
most languages are intended to build mountains (think Java, or
anything OO), awk is geared much more toward one-liners, the goal
being to reduce a solution to its bare essentials. Also, a major
use of awk has been the creation of "little languages" (graf and
pic were early examples), again showing awk's reductionist
approach to language design, and emphasizing that awk is much
more a tool for thought than a language in/of itself.

Ftwalk started as a little language -- a way of expressing
complex find(1) expressions in awk-speak. It grew as the utility
of providing an awk-like reduction of more and more of the
C/Unix API became evident. In my mind, it's always been an
experiment at reducing one's understanding of Unix systems
to their simplest expression.

Movie: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Can't recall
when I last saw a martial arts movie, so no idea how this compares.
Nor do I know quite what to make of it. I found it surreal, which
renders the violence distant and poetic. One thing I will note is
that Zhang Ziyi's cage is class as much as or more than sex.
A-

Smith is one of many prominent Negro League pitchers who were
skipped over when the Negro Leagues Committee stopped at one pitcher
and eight position players. Smith worked in Satchel Paige's shadow,
but also basked in the light Paige reflected. I don't know enough
to properly evaluate Smith, but his 1940 line is hard to argue
with: 10 wins, 0 losses, 89 innings, 34 hits, 5 walks. That's 3.9
baserunners per 9IP; Sandy Koufax's best year (albeit with many
more IP) was 7.8.

Excepting a shortstop of two (Rabbit Maranville, Joe Tinker), Mazeroski
is the weakest hitting HOF position player ever. Among second basemen,
Johnny Evers was better even without compensating for era affects, and
adjustment for Tony Lazzeri's era-inflated stats lowers him at most to
third weakest. An average hitting HOF 2B is someone like Frankie Frisch
or Billy Herman; the best 2B hitters were Nap Lajoie, Eddie Collins,
Rogers Hornsby, and Joe Morgan. (Mazeroski's freak HR in 1960 hardly
puts him in a class with any of the above. Indeed, the best hitting
2B in the 1960 series was Series MVP Bobby Richardson, an equally
freaky performance.)

Mazeroski's only claim to HOF-level fame is his glove, specifically
his DP prowess. Anecdotally, he was the fastest, slickest 2B ever at
turning the DP. The statistics bear this out. Long time ago, I munged
fielding statistics for all players, all positions, and all years, into
a sort of retrospective gold glove awards. Mazeroski dominated his
position as completely as Luis Aparicio and Brooks Robinson, but was
only the #2 all-time defensive second baseman: the long-forgotten
winner was a bare hands wizard from the 1880's named Bid McPhee.

This year the Veterans Committee skipped over naming a 19th century
player. As such, they missed a wonderful opportunity to pair Mazeroski
with McPhee. Almost all of the major holes in the HOF roster, aside
from controversies like Pete Rose and Joe Jackson, are 19th century
players, especially those who (like McPhee) played in the American
Association. (My choices would be McPhee, Deacon White, Pete Browning,
Harry Stovey, and Paul Hines.)

To illustrate my hitting assertions, I dug these stats out from the
runs created percentile data that I published in Big Bad Baseball
Annual, for HOF 2B + Bid McPhee:

#

Name

Total

Annual Percentile Rankings

1

Rogers Hornsby

8447

99 99 99 98 98 97 97 95 95 92 92 90 83 75 69

2

Eddie Collins

8368

98 97 97 96 96 95 95 95 95 94 93 93 89 80 72 72 66 61 34 14

3

Nap Lajoie

7488

99 99 98 98 95 92 92 89 88 87 86 82 79 76 60 48 46 27 20 17

4

Joe Morgan

6595

99 99 98 97 96 93 84 84 78 76 76 73 62 59 54 49 48 47 27

5

Charlie Gehringer

6407

96 95 95 93 92 91 89 89 87 85 82 76 72 36 35 18

9

Jackie Robinson

4693

96 96 96 92 88 86 84 69 40 24

11

Frankie Frisch

4490

94 93 92 89 80 78 76 76 71 69 66 66 59 35 34 12

14

Bobby Doerr

4273

90 87 86 86 85 85 85 84 70 65 60 55 53

17

Billy Herman

3900

94 92 90 85 82 80 70 62 60 59 58 56 40

24

Nellie Fox

3322

89 82 82 82 79 76 76 73 71 66 50 44 29 27 12

25

Bid McPhee

3289

87 85 85 81 79 73 69 66 66 63 63 57 54 46 45 36 29 26

28

Red Schoendienst

3049

93 88 85 81 69 69 62 62 59 54 50 48 22 19

29

Tony Lazzeri

2921

87 87 83 79 79 69 68 65 55 52 50 39

34

Miller Huggins

2488

89 82 81 76 73 64 63 60 55 43 20

38

Johnny Evers

2135

85 85 73 71 68 62 61 54 53 53 25 13

83

Bill Mazeroski

1116

72 68 64 60 59 56 55 49 46 40 32 29 03

Huggins is in the HOF as a manager, but was a scrappy player who walked
a lot. Schoendienst was probably helped by his managerial career, as well.
Evers was a fluke choice (of Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance, he was actually
the best player). Rod Carew was considered a 1B, but would've ranked #4
at 2B. (Pete Rose would've ranked #1.) The top non-HOF 2B were: Ryne
Sandberg, Hardy Richardson, Ross Barnes, Craig Biggio, Roberto Alomar,
Larry Doyle, Julio Franco, Lou Whitaker, Joe Gordon, Fred Dunlap, and
Bobby Grich (#20): mostly a mix of too old and too new.

Lost FreeCell game today, #13304. First time since Sept. 6, almost
six months. Last loss came the day before I was laid off; wondering
what this is a portent of. It's my major use of Microsoft software --
I keep an obsolete laptop off to the side, use it only for FreeCell
and Taipei these days. Art Protin claims that's all Microsoft is good
for. I prefer puzzles to games, and like FreeCell because it has a
little dazzle, and is something I can almost always win. (Well, I
cheat a little; no point getting stressed out over a game. I count a
loss if I can't solve the game in two tries, which lets me be
faster and sloppier the first time around.) Streak ended at
3501 games. That's a lot of brain massage.

Checked Fthelp changes into CVS. I get an ssh error message,
which is probably a Sourceforge problem, but getting help is hard,
possibly impossible.

Read Jon Katz'
Second
Thoughts: Microsoft on Trial on Slashdot. The article is full of
errors, misinformation, and general confusion. I can't tell how much
this reflects the appeals court, Katz, or Microsoft's PR flacks.